Twenty years ago.............
20 SECOND LAP TIMES!
3 LAPS IN ONE MINUTE!
TURBO CHARGED V8's GOING 230+ MILES PER HOUR!
MORE G's OF FORCE THAN ESCAPE VELOCITY FOR A MOON SHOT!
NO BLOOD FLOWING TO THE BRAIN!
DRIVERS CAN'T STAND UP AFTER A PRACTICE SESSION!

Inside CART's 2001 Texas debacle: The lead-up

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | April 30, 2021 4:09 PM

The rookie driver from France didn’t know what to expect from American oval racing.

Part of Target Chip Ganassi Racing’s 2001 changeover from Juan Pablo Montoya and Jimmy Vasser, Nic Minassian had mastered road racing during his pursuit of a Formula 1 career. But when it came to lapping at more than 230mph at Texas Motor Speedway when CART made its inaugural visit to the 1.5-mile oval, Minassian was a neophyte. It made TCGR’s brave and aggressive new hope the perfect foil for all that would take place during one of CART’s most notorious failures.

Stunned by all he encountered on his oval debut, Minassian lacked the experience to know he’d been thrown into a most unusual mechanical tornado. As cars whipped around at blood-draining speeds, most drivers fought the effects of spinning in the world’s fastest washing machine. One driver, overcome by the relentless cornering and gravity’s extreme pull, was briefly lulled to sleep, waking with an urgent need to turn left at 235mph.

“You felt like your face was being pulled out of your helmet in the corners,” Minassian says.

By the time the chapter was closed 20 years ago on the ill-fated Firestone Firehawk 600, law suits had been filed, lifelong grudges were formed, and an indelible stain was left on the sport.

What happened when the world’s fastest open-wheel cars went to the wrong track, as told by 12 people who were there.

Ready for action in 1997, Texas Motor Speedway launched its inaugural season by playing host to a NASCAR event in April and the brand-new Indy Racing League in June. Massive grandstands packed with fans affirmed the decision by parent company Speedway Motorsports Incorporated to plant its flag in Texas with a big, fast bullring featuring significant banking in the corners. NASCAR and the IRL would become the main attractions at TMS through 2000.

Mike Zizzo, CART VP of Communications 1996-2002, Texas Motor Speedway VP of Communications 2005-2019: There was a ton of excitement considering that we were going to a great facility like that that was fairly new, and you had a great promoter with Eddie Gossage in terms of taking a new event and putting it on a big stage. Dallas-Fort Worth was really booming at the time; it had become a top five market, and that’s why it jumped out as a place CART should look into for a race at Texas Motor Speedway.

Negotiations between CART and TMS opened during the summer of 2000, and CART’s board of directors approved its addition to the 2001 schedule. An event date of April 27-29 was eventually chosen, making TMS the fourth stop on the calendar after opening at Mexico on March 11, moving to Brazil to race on March 25, and Long Beach on April 8.

Chris Kneifel, IndyCar, Sports Car Driver, CART Chief Steward and Director of Competition 2001-2005: I remember when the contract was signed between Texas Speedway and CART, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s odd.’ It didn’t seem to be the best fit. It had been an IRL race up until then. I guess they were going to have both in the calendar year of 2001, but I thought that was strange. And then I thought a little bit more about it. At the time Bobby Rahal was the interim president of CART and Eddie Gossage was obviously the head of the Texas Speedway, and Bobby and Eddie’s relationship goes well back to the Miller days in CART. So (through) he and Eddie’s relationship, they were able to make something happen.

Despite the vast technological and performance-related differences between the IRL and CART formulas, the last IRL race of 2000, held over October 13-15 at TMS, gave a glimpse of where the low-tech, all-oval series registered at the track with Greg Ray’s run to pole at 215.352mph in his Team Menard Dallara-Oldsmobile.

Six days before Christmas, Rahal’s CART team ventured south to a frosty Texas where Kenny Brack, an IRL veteran and Indy 500 winner with five TMS starts before moving to its rival series, performed a test that would set the benchmark in his Reynard-Ford/Cosworth for CART’s maiden race on the oval. A number of errors in CART’s approach to preparing itself for TMS followed.
CART’s call on TMS’s viability was based on a single-car test involving Kenny Brack, in very different conditions to what the field faced when it returned for the race. Motorsport Images

Mike Zizzo: From a competition perspective, we had that one test with Kenny and he only ran high teens, low 220s.

Kenny Brack: We tested there in the wintertime and it felt OK with the level of speeds. It was really windy, and we did not run quality downforce nor a qualifying engine.

Robin Miller: The only test they did was with Rahal and Kenny Brack before signing off on it. And the temperature was nothing compared to when they’d race; it was real cool. And they didn’t do a lot of laps. They didn’t give it much of a chance.

Kenny Brack: I remember [name withheld] coming down and asked me how it felt, and I said ‘It’s very windy.’ He said ‘Well, it’s the same for everybody.’ It was, but I was the only one testing…

Mike Zizzo: There were no concerns at all when he ran that test, but it was a limited test. We never ran a full-field test. I know that I was pushing forward selfishly from a PR perspective, and on the track side they wanted to do it as well, because we thought it would be a great preview of what was in store for the fans in Dallas-Fort Worth in terms of what CART was all about. We never got that done.

 

The first divide on the topic of CART and TMS did not emerge between the series and track: an internal fight developed when CART’s competition department wanted to keep its high-tech, high-speed machines well clear of the oval.

Inside CART's 2001 Texas debacle: The lead-up

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | April 30, 2021 4:09 PM

The first divide on the topic of CART and TMS did not emerge between the series and track: an internal fight developed when CART’s competition department wanted to keep its high-tech, high-speed machines well clear of the oval.

Despite setting a fastest lap in the 221mph range – little more than 6mph faster than Ray’s recent IRL pole – there was no question whether the CART cars, in more representative track conditions, could lap at significantly faster average speeds. Weather records show a high of 46F in Dallas-Forth Worth during Brack’s December 19 test. The same records reveal CART’s opening day of practice at TMS on April 27 was almost double the number, reaching a peak of 81F.

CART’s board, comprised of team owners and executives, listened to the concerns of former Indy car racer Wally Dallenbach, its chief steward of more than 20 years who would groom the incoming Kneifel as his replacement in 2001. Dallenbach’s objections were overruled.

Robin Miller: I remember Wally saying, ‘I just don’t know that our cars can run here; I just think they’re going to go too fast.’ I remember that like it was yesterday.

Chris Kneifel: Fast-forward however many months later, now I’m chief steward of CART and I mean, I’m barely one month on the job, and I’ve never been to Texas Speedway before. After the Monterrey, Mexico race (on March 11), we went for a site visit, and I was there with Wally Dallenbach, [CART Logistics VP] Billy Kamphousen, [CART Director of Safety] Lon Bromley, and a few others. I remember going around and Eddie Gossage had all of the big blacked-out Suburbans touring the track, and the first thing that caught my eye was the vertical fence posts were outside the fence, which I thought it was wrong. They were on the track side. The posts were on the track side of the fence.

Kneifel’s concerns about the exposed steel poles atop the outer walls would soon prove to be well-founded, but his series wouldn’t bear the scars. During additional private tests conducted at TMS by CART teams prior to the race, and the running on Friday and Saturday at the event, drivers who crashed were fortunate to avoid climbing the walls and hitting them.

Chris Kneifel: I asked to stop the Suburban, I walked up the incredibly steep banking and I’m thinking, ‘Holy crap, I can’t believe that this is the way it is. Obviously this isn’t going to change any time soon.’ I had some concerns just with the fence.

Just over one month later, those fears were validated at the Texas IRL race. Riding over the back of a car that blew its engine between Turns 1 and 2, Sam Schmidt Motorsports driver Davey Hamilton’s Dallara-Oldsmobile struck a pole on the exit of Turn 2 while flying sideways, cleaving the front of the tub off near his knees. The Idahoan’s feet and bones in his lower extremities were pulverized.
Kneifel’s fears about the Texas fences were validated when Davey Hamilton suffered leg injuries in an IRL crash at the track shortly after CART’s initial inspection. Motorsport Images

Adding to Dallenbach’s protests, warnings from a few CART drivers who took part in the early 2001 tests were met with no intent to change the series’ plan to race at TMS. Average speeds crept to the 225-226mph range for some who tested using the performance specifications outlined by CART for the upcoming event. Along with Ford/Cosworth, Honda and Toyota poured untold millions into their 2.65-liter turbocharged V8 engine programs each season. Easily eclipsing anything the 700hp naturally-aspirated IRL V8 motors could make during that period, one of the CART engine builders estimates a safe 900hp being on tap for its drivers while spinning to peak RPMs of 15,800 at Texas.

CART’s chassis and aerodynamic formula offered further performance advantages, as the cars manufactured by Lola and Reynard made prodigious downforce even in oval trim. The series attempted to slow the cars by mandating the use of the Hanford Device, a vertical plate mounted to the back of the rear wings that acted like a small parachute for a leading car while opening a large hole in the air for trailing cars to zoom past on longer straights.

From Brack’s unrepresentative test in mismatched ambient conditions, to the ignoring of pleas from others who tested, went faster, and were convinced the ferocious speeds were not a good match for the track, to forming the event’s technical regulations without a wider sampling of cars and data, multiple warning signs were missed.

Chris Kneifel: We’re up in race control, and high atop in the ovals you’re typically perched above the grandstands and could see the full track. As the first practice started and cars were pulling out, I thought to myself, ‘Holy crap, it’s hard to watch these cars.’ You’re trying to follow one car and it’s hard to even focus just doing that. To think that they’re basically out there doing three laps in a minute is nuts in itself. We’re talking 22-23 second per lap. On a oval that’s 1.5 miles. So they’re covering almost 4.5 miles in a minute. Think about that one. The speeds are massively high, and they’re just getting faster and faster and faster.

Looking down on pit lane, Kneifel and the other members of race control began to see and hear the first evidence of a problem.

Chris Kneifel: We started hearing little dribbles of information coming over the radios from the pit lane about a driver got out of his car after a 10-lap run and lost his balance, seemed to not have his equilibrium. We saw things where drivers entered the pit lane and missed their pit box – disoriented enough that they didn’t see where they were supposed to turn into their pit box. And so it was mounting.

Mo Nunn Racing’s Tony Kanaan topped the session with a lap of 233.539mph. Although Ray’s IRL pole was set on his own, and the fastest CART drivers had the benefit of aerodynamic tows on that Friday morning, it was hard to ignore the 18.187mph difference in speed.

As the first session came to an end, a series of bizarre episodes were witnessed as drivers began climbing from their cars. Forsythe Racing’s Patrick Carpentier, dealing with the flu, vomited on pit lane. In the moment, it was assumed his illness was the cause.

Oriol Servia: driver, Sigma Autosport: There was something, a force, a speed that I just could not get used to.

Nic Minassian: At first, it felt like what was happening was normal. I felt that physically, I couldn’t do it, rather than the car was too much for that track. Because I was a rookie, I felt like I was not able to say anything in the car because it wasn’t right for a rookie to say that he’s not able to do what he’s been told to do.

I remember feeling the force in the car. Your head was being pulled off and your mouth was deformed. It was really something else. Those cars were like monsters. Then there is this thing that you don’t usually have when you feel sick. But I wasn’t sick. It’s just the speed that made me sick, and that you cannot really control it. All you tell yourself is like, ‘Is it me? Is it normal?’ So you push yourself. You dig a bit deeper. You say, “OK, I’ve got to job to do. I’ve got to do it and I’m a rookie. If I don’t, I look stupid.’ That’s how silly it was in my head.

 

like the brain was not getting enough juice to process normally.

Inside CART's 2001 Texas debacle: The lead-up

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Oriol Servia: I remember, and this is before even feeling dizzy or anything, just being on track, during practice, you would feel the Gs and all that, but this was first time that a guy would slow to go to the pits and everything was a close call. You couldn’t react fast enough. For some reason, the brain – at least mine – was not processing fast enough to adjust to what was coming at me at that speed.

Then we realized it wasn’t the actual speed of going 230 average at Texas; it was like the brain was not getting enough juice to process normally. Honestly, I remember like if it was today. I was trying to look up far ahead like I always do on ovals, and I still didn’t have enough time to anticipate what was happening. The brain wasn’t just processing it. That was the bottom line. When we started doing longer runs, we all realized that there was something really wrong.

I didn’t really get dizzy while driving, but the second I would come into the pits, the world was all of a sudden spinning around and you had to breathe hard to regain yourself, like almost when you feel like your blood sugar is low and you have to sit down and breathe to get control of yourself.

Helio Castroneves: driver, Team Penske: After the first session, I was like, man, I’m kind of dizzy. There was a lot of doubt in my mind at that moment.

The second and final practice session got underway on Friday, and it’s here where every person interviewed cited the same event that shook the CART paddock.

Chris Kneifel: The one that caught everyone’s attention was Gugelmin.

Dr. Steven Olvey: We had two big crashes that weekend. The first one was Mauricio Gugelmin and the other was Cristiano da Matta. They were two crashes that nobody understood. The drivers had no idea. When you looked at the video, they weren’t in any trouble. And when the mechanics looked at the cars, there was nothing that broke on the car, like a wheel rim or a shock or anything. And they both crashed.

Mauricio was really lucky. His crash was really severe. Mauricio could have been hurt badly, but he just lucked out where he hit the wall. The car was pretty substantial, and Mauricio is pretty substantial, so he got through the thing without being hurt, but it could have been real bad. He was 66 Gs at the first hit in Turn 2 and then went all the way down to the third turn and hit the wall again at 113 Gs. The reason why Gugelmin crashed was a mystery to everybody; we hadn’t figured out why.
As an oval novice, Minassian initially thought that the sensations he was struggling with simply came with the territory. Motorsport Images

Robin Miller: I was standing right there on the inside when he crashed and it was like nothing I’d ever heard. It kept going on and on. It was a crash for the ages. Olvey and [Dr. Terry] Trammel jumped over the fence and here’s this car; I don’t think it had any wheels left on it. And Gugelmin, the first thing he said to Olvey and Trammel was, ‘I tried to get this thing as close to you guys as I could!’

To have that presence of mind… I mean, he was ****ing bruised. It didn’t break anything, but it bruised him from head to toe. And then da Matta’s crash was almost as spectacular. You were just like, ‘Holy ****ing cow. The thing never stopped crashing.’

Helio Castroneves: I was on track at the time and saw the marks from the crash at Turn 2, and he was like a pinball crashing back and forth down the track and the marks kept going.

Scott Dixon: driver, Pacwest Racing: Probably the strongest memory I have is going and seeing my teammate Mo Gugelmin that night in the hospital. He was already black and blue.

Chris Kneifel: He lost control of his car in the middle of Turn 2 and ended up three-quarters of a mile away by pit entrance. Wally Dallenbach always called Speedway crashes ‘quarter-milers.’ So you had a crash at Indy, you crash at Michigan, crash at California Speedway, he called them ‘quarter-milers’ because that’s how far it would be from where the guy crashed to where he came to a stop. Well, with Gugelmin, this was a ‘three-quarter-miler,’ just to put a little context on it. Unbelievable.

And just the ferociousness and the power, the speed of it. He had some very large high-G impacts, all of them just ricocheted him and kicked him down the road further. So the fact that he literally had a body full of bruises, but no other significant injuries, that was certainly a blessing. But the guy had three enormous crashes all in one.

The crash broke the front of Gugelmin’s Reynard chassis away from the car, exposing his feet. As Dr. Olvey recounts in his book Rapid Response, stopping short of the infield wall at Turn 4 saved his lower legs from being damaged. But the visuals of the enormous crash stunned many of his fellow drivers. Gulgelmin did not take part in the rest of the event.

After the second session reached the checkered flag, more drivers gathered privately to compare notes on their experiences behind the steering wheel.

Scott Dixon: I remember the intensity of seeing some of the looks on some the older guy’s faces, like why this was just stupid. I remember looking at some of their reactions and I’m like, ‘****, this is not good.’ But I was just waiting for the team to tell me what to do. I was 20 or 21, and not very smart.

Helio Castroneves: I remember hearing Patrick Carpentier saying he kind of blacked out, and a lot of people saying ‘I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened.’

Oriol Servia: As a race car driver, nine times out of 10 fans ask you, ‘How does it feel to go so fast?’ And usually, it’s the same answer. ‘Yeah, it’s fast, but you get used to it right away, you’ve been doing it all your life, etc.’ Plus, even when I talked about the fastest I’ve ever been in a car, it was at Fontana in 2002 in a race. I hit a top speed of 257mph. So when I talk about that, and people ask me how it feels, I always say, ‘Well, funny enough, it feels slow because every movement at that speed is like being in a plane. It’s very slow. Your hands move very slowly, the car reacts very slowly, you set up for the corner, and it turns.’ Even when you’re fighting another car at that speed, maybe you were passing a guy that is 256, so it’s a 1mph difference. Everything happens slow, right?

When you lose control is when you realize the speed and how fast the wall comes to you. Driving normally, speed is really not a factor in our minds. It really is not. You’re used to it. Texas was the first time that I felt different.

 

Texas IndyCar qualifying cancelled due to weather

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emailBy Joey Barnes | May 1, 2021 3:41 PM

The NTT IndyCar Series doubleheader at Texas Motor Speedway has already been affected by weather.

Humid conditions kept moisture hanging around the 1.5-mile superspeedway, which extended track drying efforts and postponed practice until 1:30 p.m. CT. Although the 90-minute session kicked off the weekend’s festivities, the series opted to cancel qualifying for tonight’s Genesys 300.

As a result, the field will be set by entrant points, which means Alex Palou’s No. 10 Chip Ganassi Racing Honda will lead the field to the green flag, set to wave at 6:10 p.m. local time.

The only qualifying session of the weekend was originally supposed to set the field for both races: Lap 1 for Race 1 and Lap 2 for Race 2.

While tonight’s race is set on entrant points, it has not been confirmed — but is expected — that tomorrow’s XPEL 375 will follow the same format. Green flag for tomorrow’s race is set for 4:15 p.m. local time.

Texas, IndyCar

 

Speeds continued to increase as Team Green’s Paul Tracy moved Friday’s best of 233.539mph to a new height of 236.678mph. It was nearly identical to the all-time qualifying record at the Indianapolis 500 of 236.986mph, set on the giant 2.5-mile oval where the long straights allow for more acceleration before reaching Turns 1 and 3.

Inside CART’s 2001 Texas debacle: The invisible monster

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | May 1, 2021 11:27 AM

We pick up after the opening day of practice at Texas Motor Speedway concluded with Mauricio Gugelmin’s “three-quarter-miler” crash and drivers privately confiding within each other on the forces that were affecting their bodies.

Down to 25 cars after Gugelmin’s withdrawal, activities resumed Saturday morning as teams went into the third and final practice to prepare for qualifying in the afternoon, and get in the last bits of running in race configuration to ready themselves for Sunday’s Firestone Firehawk 600.

Speeds continued to increase as Team Green’s Paul Tracy moved Friday’s best of 233.539mph to a new height of 236.678mph. It was nearly identical to the all-time qualifying record at the Indianapolis 500 of 236.986mph, set on the giant 2.5-mile oval where the long straights allow for more acceleration before reaching Turns 1 and 3.

By hitting the same 236mph average at TMS while missing a full mile of Indy’s length to rocket into the turns, Tracy reinforced just how much speed was being made in the four Texan corners.
Paul Tracy’s awesome practice lap matched the all-time Indy speed record on a considerably shorter track. Lesley Ann Miller/Motorsport Images

Scott Dixon: It was damn fast, man, like super-fast. Just feeling the compression in the banking and that you could go flat. The combined Gs made it crazy. It was a situation where before you got into the corner, you had to make sure that you took a breath before you got in there, because there was no breathing midway through.

But then also it’s the fact of how long the turn is. At Indy, it’s very short, quick, sharp turns. You don’t have to think about it for too long. But at Texas it’s long corners, and then going at those speeds, you don’t have a whole lot of time to really think about what’s coming next.

I do remember the feeling (of) just how intense the G loading was. But for me at that point, it kind of felt cool because it was the first time that we were going so hard like that, and I hadn’t really grown that part in your mind where you’re thinking, “****, I probably shouldn’t be doing this.”

For the third consecutive practice session, highlighted by Tracy’s unbelievable lap, the entire field took another step up in speed. For more than half the drivers, the third practice outing also came with a worsening of the problems inside the cockpit.

Nic Minassian: The whole lap was flat-out. I remember doing a long run to prepare for the race; I think I did 22 or 25 laps in a row. It was a long run to check the fuel consumption and the tire wear and all that. And I remember being in the car and passing the 15th, 16th lap, and starting to feel a little bit… you don’t feel right in the car. You feel a little bit dizzy.

I remember putting my right elbow in the side of the cockpit to hold the steering wheel because the steering was too heavy and my head was squashed on the side of the cockpit. I felt like, “Oh, gosh. That’s really rough.” So I was forcing myself in the car. “Carry on. Go on. Go, go. You don’t feel very well. Go. It’s OK. You carry on. You carry on.”

Eventually, I remember saying on the radio, “I don’t feel too good anymore. I’m going to pass out.” So I went to the pits and got out of the car. I couldn’t walk straight. I think it was Mike Hull, who was there at the time being the boss of my car, and my engineer, Bill Pappas.

And Bill tells me, “Oh, you did a good job.” And I was relieved a little bit because I felt like I was letting the team down, that physically, I couldn’t run the car as long as the others, but actually I did. I did run the car very long.

Minassian was fortunate to stop prior to da Matta’s crash in his Newman/Haas Racing Lola-Toyota. Unlike Gugelmin, “Shorty” was not injured. Considering the severe forces involved with the impacts, da Matta was lucky that his car suffered the brunt of the damage and dissipated enough energy to protect its pilot. A fresh Lola-Toyota was readied for da Matta to use in qualifying.

The crisis of confidence taking place inside Minassian likely prevented another Saturday morning crash.

Nic Minassian: I thought, “Look, I’m going to pass out so I better stop, because right now, I have forced my brain to push myself forward. Right now, I’m going to lose it. I’m going to end up squashed at 230 miles an hour in the wall.” And I just stopped. To be honest, I felt ashamed about it when I stopped.

I felt ashamed because I thought it was me. I thought I was weak. But then when I stopped and was so dizzy I couldn’t walk straight, I felt a bit better about what was happening to me.

The memory of this will stay with me forever. You felt like your face was being pulled out of your helmet in the corners. It’s like, “That’s mad!”

With three sessions completed and two enormous crashes to clean up, and despite being a day and a half into the event, one troubling item remained: CART had been kept in the dark by its drivers. Some officials like Kneifel had seen some strange things and gotten reports of woozy drivers, but up to that point, all of the frightening tales from inside the cars remained private.

Among the various characters to surface during the Texas CART ordeal, Newman/Haas Racing public relations ace Kathi Lauterbach took a brave step forward in the aftermath of da Matta’s crash. Her decision changed the event’s trajectory and likely spared a number of drivers from calamitous outcomes.
Kathi Lauterbach, here (middle) celebrating Graham Rahal’s victory at Texas in 2016 with Team RLL, is a longtime staple of the IndyCar PR scene but all the drivers owe her a debt for her actions at TMS in 2001. Image courtesy of Kathi Lauterbach via Twitter

Dr. Steven Olvey, CART Medical Director, 1979-2003: Kathi came into our medical unit and she said, “I don’t know if I ought to tell you this, but I overheard that a couple of the drivers felt kind of crummy while they were driving. And to the point that they were lightheaded and just didn’t feel right and had some visual stuff happening.”

It’s just remarkable that she had the presence of mind to do that. Until Kathi walked into the medical unit, we didn’t have a clue.

Some accounts of the visit to Dr. Olvey suggest Lauterbach gained the information by eavesdropping. She provided clarification that the news came from feedback received directly from her Newman/Haas drivers da Matta and Christian Fittipaldi, and once more while holding a conversation with a team owner.

After the download from Lauterbach, Olvey’s first guess at the cause of the problems went in an interesting direction.

 

I had sent drivers through the years to an ear, nose and throat specialist for this, and they know how to get it fixed. So I thought, “Well, that’s probably what this is because it’s not that uncommon.”

Inside CART’s 2001 Texas debacle: The invisible monster

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Dr. Steven Olvey: I thought maybe they’d been flying a lot. This can happen with people doing a lot of flying, because the ear canals have little stones that if they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, they keep our balance under control. But if they get dislodged and one stone gets in one of the canals that it’s not supposed to be in, it can throw you off. I had sent drivers through the years to an ear, nose and throat specialist for this, and they know how to get it fixed. So I thought, “Well, that’s probably what this is because it’s not that uncommon.”

I went and talked to some of the drivers, and they actually felt worse than they usually do with this kind of ear thing. And then I got the idea that it sounded more like it was related to the G levels that they were getting. So I asked one of the team managers at Paul Tracy’s team to see what kind of readings their guys were getting in the cars.

Paul had run 237 miles an hour or something, and the computer said they were getting 3.5 vertical Gs and 5.5 lateral Gs. That seemed pretty high. And we never had a combination like that where you had both vertical and lateral Gs pretty much off the charts.

So I called a friend of mine who used to be the medical director for NASA, Richard Jennings. I called him because he was stationed at NASA in Houston; he works for SpaceX now. I had trouble getting hold of him. He was not at home and his wife said that she wasn’t sure where he was going.

As Dr. Olvey chased Dr. Jennings, CART moved into the afternoon’s proceedings with qualifying.

Dr. Steven Olvey: I spent probably two hours trying to track him down, calling his cell phone over and over. All of a sudden, there’s a hand on my shoulder and I turn around and look it up and it’s him! He just decided to come up and see everybody and he’s a big race fan; goes to Indy every year. He said, “You look kind of upset.” And I said, “Well, we’ve got a major issue here. We’re not really sure how bad an issue it is or what’s going on, but it’s just weird. We’ve got drivers that got sick when they drove, we’ve had two crashes and we don’t have any idea of why the cars crashed. And these are the Gs we’re getting.”

He looked at the tracing that I had and how high the Gs were. He says, “You’ve got a big problem.” And I said, “OK, what’s the big problem?” He says, “Well, it’s physiologically not possible to drive with this combination of vertical and lateral Gs. It’s worse than any rollercoaster that’s ever been built.”

After talking to Richard, I knew we had a major problem because he’s an expert. Then I got hold of [former chief steward] Wally Dallenbach and Joe Heitzler, the [CART] CEO.
The complexity of the issue facing CART officials was illustrated by the mix of symptoms – or lack of them – encountered by the drivers. Phil Abbott/Motorsport Images

The problem was far from linear. Some drivers were heavily affected by the extreme Gs while others were asymptomatic. It would eventually make achieving a consensus among drivers on how to proceed with the event more challenging than anyone desired.

Kenny Brack: I didn’t experience any problems. But I know many other drivers did.

Scott Dixon: I never experienced any of the issues. I never had any of the dizziness or the blacking out.

Max Papis: driver, Team Rahal: It was badass to drive around at 230. I just felt amazing. I loved every lap I did. I loved the feeling of getting squashed in the car vertically, laterally…. If you ask me, I didn’t know it was too much for my body, but I was one of the most fit drivers as well. Did it feel weird? Yes, but I guess that it was more weird for other people.

Chris Kneifel, chief steward: When you have a car fly up into the air, that’s pretty obvious, right? That’s something that is plain to see what we were dealing with. This was something that was an invisible monster, and it was something that was every little bit different to the individual. So it wasn’t that you could say it would be in a minute for this guy. This guy’s good for five minutes of running, or 10, or maybe it doesn’t even happen to this guy but, sooner or later, almost everyone’s going to have a problem. And you start to realize how large the magnitude of the situation was.

And the thing was the crashes. It’s not that crashes don’t happen. Obviously they do. But it was the fact that you look at the data and it’s not like the car got loose. It’s not like he hit a bump; you look at the steering trace, everything was perfect.

So what happened? The unexplained was happening. It was hard to comprehend, to really get your head around what was going on. But when you take that and you couple it with the fact that the cars were almost doing three laps a minute, it’s just massive, massive speeds we hadn’t seen like that before.

It really boiled down to the human element and so many of the drivers who I had face-to-face conversations with, I could tell by just looking in their eyes. They didn’t have to say a word. You could just see it. You knew something was different. And that group of drivers was as upper echelon as there ever was.

Dr. Steven Olvey: I got with Wally and Joe and said, “Guys, we can’t run here at these speeds.” And they said, “What do you mean?” And I went over it all and I had Richard there talk to him and he said, “You can’t keep doing this. It’s physiologically possible. You’d have guys blacking out and crashing right and left and it could be a disaster.”

 

once you got going past 228, people were coming in and not knowing what they were doing. There was the ongoing threat of, are we going too fast here for the body and the brain?

Inside CART’s 2001 Texas debacle: The invisible monster

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | May 1, 2021 11:27 AM



Brack, the first CART driver to test at TMS, earned pole position with a 233.447mph performance. Patrick Carpentier, illness notwithstanding, was able to muster enough speed to start second with a 233.345mph blast. And Oriol Servia, driving for the small, upstart Sigma Autosport outfit, was a surprising third at 232.978mph.

All totaled, 21 of the 25 drivers registered laps above 228mph during their short qualifying runs, which soon became a number that was an important piece of the puzzle.

Wally Dallenbach: The threshold that was created at that racetrack with the banking was about 228mph. And up until that speed, it seemed like you could deal with the Gs, but once you got going past 228, people were coming in and not knowing what they were doing. There was the ongoing threat of, are we going too fast here for the body and the brain?

I got together with our doctors and they concluded that this was happening and that the only way to prevent something like was to either slow the cars down, or to wear G suits, and I said we’re not going to do that. But they explained that apparently in the medical terms, blood was running away from the brain in this situation — it was typical of what happens to jet fighters, and that’s why they wear the G suits.
CART Medical Director Dr. Steven Olvey shows a chart with a driver’s G-force loading data, illustrating the unusual loads being placed on the drivers at TMS. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images

Helio Castroneves: First of all, our cars back then, we’re talking about 900 horsepower, right? There was no playing around. When you leave the pits, those cars are so strong that you’re afraid to touch the throttle. And a place like Texas with huge banking… back then, it wasn’t very common to be on huge banking. So we go out, as soon as you get to the banking and you start pushing the throttle a little bit more, a little bit more, little bit more, and things are happening so fast that you don’t know what’s happening.

All of a sudden, you’re just the passenger when you first go flat-out. You’re like, holy crap. And there it was — we were doing 230, 235 with the draft. Then we start getting confident, comfortable for that top speed. So you start taking wing out to go faster. And that’s where the scary part was. You start taking downforce out of the car, and you don’t feel anything. It was absolutely stuck. It is just going faster, faster. You’re like, “Oh man, this is tough. This is really tough.”

Tom German: race engineer, Gil de Ferran, Team Penske: There’s three key points. There’s the sustained G loading through the corner. I spent some time on this after the race, reading some of the flight research papers to understand what tests have been done on what fighter pilots do, and what actual data is available on the physical side of this problem.

In a fighter jet, when they talk about the high G loadings, they’re almost exclusively talking about vertical Gs relative to the body. It’s pulling blood from your brain, down your torso into your legs. So the G suits squeeze your legs, squeeze your torso; all those things are to counteract that migration of blood down out of your brain. And the G loading at Texas is a combination of lateral G loading and vertical G loading. That’s the real problem. Nine Gs in an airplane, the fighter pilots see it for a couple seconds, and then they’re fine. But they never see it for a couple minutes.

So the first key point is the sustained G loadings through the corners. And perhaps the more important one that gets largely overlooked was the recovery time. At Texas, you have very short recovery times. You’re going so fast on the straightaways, loaded up through the corners, you release a little bit down the backstraight, loaded again, the front straight still has a decent amount of G loading on as you’re going around there. Your body really doesn’t get the chance to recover. So the length of a run becomes a significant factor here.

And if you took some of these research graphs on pilots, they have a chart of “Gs versus time,” and there’s a shape to the curve of what’s acceptable and what’s not. The chart shows how the body can take super-high G loads if it’s sustained for a very short period of time. But as your “time sustained” goes up, the body’s G threshold comes down dramatically. And so that, combined with not being able to recover, is what we were seeing in Texas. It was everything the research papers said you should not be doing to the human body.

The culprit had been found. And it was unlike anything TMS or select CART officials expected.

Thrust into an emergency, and with a race to run in front of 60,000 fans in 24 hours, clowns and heroes would begin to emerge behind closed doors as the Saturday evening sun fell behind the grandstands.

 

We rejoin just after the drivers’ G-related secret was revealed to CART’s doctor, and the panic button’s been hit after confirming the cars were too fast for the human mind and body to endure Texas Motor Speedway in their existing technical specification.

Inside CART’s 2001 Texas debacle: Silent running

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | May 2, 2021 5:42 PM

We rejoin just after the drivers’ G-related secret was revealed to CART’s doctor, and the panic button’s been hit after confirming the cars were too fast for the human mind and body to endure Texas Motor Speedway in their existing technical specification.

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Inside CART’s 2001 Texas debacle: The invisible monster

Inside CART's 2001 Texas debacle: The lead-up

The Firestone Firehawk 600 was grinding to a halt as Saturday afternoon transitioned to dusk. The fans who’d just watched qualifying take place didn’t know, and most of the assembled media were unaware. But behind the scenes, in various tents and conference rooms, track and series officials, engine manufacturers, and teams were buckling in for a late night of constant meetings, brainstorming sessions, and something approximating a mass intervention with the 25 remaining drivers.

Dr. Steven Olvey, CART medical director: We had a meeting and I had to lead it, so I took all 25 drivers and said, “How many of you have had these issues with balance, coordination — you get out of the car and you feel like you ought not to walk and have to sit down for a while?” Nobody said anything for about two or three minutes.

Chris Kneifel, CART chief steward: In terms of drivers, paid drivers, it was really different in those days than it is now. There were a lot of guys making millions, well into the seven figures, a lot of them every year. Five to seven million dollars. And they weren’t going to upset the apple cart unless they were told to.

Dr. Steven Olvey: And then, the first one raised his hand, and then somebody else agreed, and then I think it was Helio Castroneves who said, “Yeah, I had that.” And pretty soon, pretty much all admitted to having weird symptoms.
Team Penske’s Castroneves, here leading Cristiano da Matta’s Newman-Haas Lola, was among those who felt the need to speak up. Motorsport Images

Helio Castroneves: So I remember going to the hotel on that Friday, having dinner, and drinking a lot of water. I was so thirsty. The next day, there was the big drivers meeting and Dr. Olvey was like, “Did you guys feel dizzy?” And I’m thinking like, “Oh, I felt that,” but I didn’t raise my hand. I was kind of quiet. And he was like, “Are any of you guys thirsty? Have blackouts, and symptoms like that?” I was like, “Oh, I didn’t have a blackout, but man, I was really thirsty.”

And I was like, “Should I tell him I felt that? Should I raise my hand?” I didn’t know what to say. I was thinking like, “Well, if you feel those things, you should.” But I didn’t want to be the first, and then I see a lot of experienced drivers start raising their hands. Like, more than half. I was like, “You know what, I felt that. I’m not going to lie. I felt that.”

As the outpouring of affirmations came in, Dr. Olvey and his friend Dr. Richard Jennings, the NASA flight specialist, were stunned to learn one driver experienced a phenomenon known as G-LOC, the ‘G-force Induced Loss of Consciousness’ while hurtling between Turns 2 and 3 at unabated speed.

If a single miracle was visited upon the Texas event, this was it.

Dr. Steven Olvey: One guy actually had G-LOC. He was unconscious from the entire second turn through the third turn before he came back to consciousness. And the only way he got there without crashing was just muscle memory, basically.

Helio Castroneves: That’s when they started to explain about astronauts. They said that if they go to like 4.7 or 5.3 Gs or something like that for 30 seconds, they black out. So, our situation was a little different from going into space, but we were going 30 minutes at 4.5 Gs, 5 Gs. And that’s where we’re like, this is serious. There was no way to avoid it.

Mike Zizzo: CART VP of Communications 1996-2002, Texas Motor Speedway VP of Communications 2005-2019: To hear drivers that are fearless starting to raise concerns… The one who hit me the most was Alex Zanardi. Alex would race anything, anywhere, at any speed. He felt sorry for some of the younger drivers because he knew they had to drive. They didn’t have the clout to say no to their team owners, and there were some owners who I won’t name, because some are there still today, but they all weren’t supportive of stopping.

And Alex said, “I have a choice. I don’t have to drive if I don’t want to.” But he said, “I’m going to do what everyone else is going to do.” Then PT (Paul Tracy) was probably the most outspoken about the other side of the equation about we need to race regardless.

Kenny Brack: I think Paul and I were the most vocal in the drivers meeting to get on with it. But, of course, it’s easy to say that when you didn’t experience this G-force problem yourself.

Mike Zizzo: It got very interesting in the drivers meeting. But it wasn’t a unanimous, “We’re not going to race.”

Although there were a few holdouts among the drivers, the conversations were described as mostly civil and productive. The same could not be said when their bosses and figureheads from the series, track, and engine manufacturers got together behind closed doors.

 

That race wasn’t going to happen. Because with Honda and Toyota, and Ford/Cosworth, they weren’t going to agree to do anything.

Cart’s 2001 Texas debacle: Silent running

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Chris Kneifel: That race wasn’t going to happen. Because with Honda and Toyota, and Ford/Cosworth, they weren’t going to agree to do anything.

Robin Miller: They had a meeting Saturday night with the engine manufacturers, and somebody from the track and somebody from CART said, “Look, how about if we put a chicane in the backstretch?” They’re like, “No.” “What if we take the wings off?” “No.” “Well, what if we turn the boost down?” “No.”

They were so desperate to try and figure out a way to keep the race going.

Mike Zizzo: The concern from my side was we had such a difficult recent history with driver fatalities and severe injuries. We’d lost Greg [Moore] and Gonzalo [Rodriguez] in ’99, and that still stung for everyone. So then you have Michael Andretti, maybe the most respected guy we have in the race, talking about how it felt like he had a 30-pound weight on his chest from all the G forces. I’m not gonna lie; it scared us. We got to a point where any idea was on the table. It was as far-fetched as making a chicane out of cones, if it would make things better.

Dr. Steven Olvey: We had all the engine people and anybody that had any mechanical knowledge trying to figure out how can we bring the G curve down and have a decent race. The idea of putting a chicane on the back straight didn’t make any sense. And they wouldn’t do anything really with the engines. The engine guys went crazy. They said you’ll screw up all the engines and they won’t be any good, you’ll throw them away.

Mike Hull, managing director, Target Chip Ganassi Racing: One of the big names from an engine manufacturer stood up and should have won an Academy Award for the acting job he put on for why they couldn’t detune their engines. It was reprehensible.
Various technical changes were considered to slow the cars down, but none satisfied all the interested parties. Motorsport Images

Tom German, race engineer for Gil de Ferran, Team Penske: I don’t want to say it was a surprise, because we certainly knew we were at unprecedented G levels. And our focus really shifts at that point more to what are the realistic possibilities to slow the cars down? We didn’t really go too far down the aerodynamic route. I think we had a pretty good handle on what the options were, and there was nothing that was going to make a significant difference in G loading that we had readily available to us, at the track, to change the aerodynamics.

Another race engineer who declined to be identified for this story recalled a period during a practice session where he was unable to find the point where raising the car would reduce underbody downforce and slow its cornering capabilities:

“We ran out of bright ideas on how to take speed away, I think we wound up at a three-inch front ride height and a five-inch rear ride height. And yet we kept going faster and faster. At Indy, that would be like 0.6 of an inch.”

Tom German: So we really looked at it from a perspective of even getting way outside the box on the engine RPM or the boost level; is it feasible to do something there? It was down to the engine manufacturers to make a big change to the horsepower. But they said they couldn’t because if they’d run at lower RPMs, there were resonances ranges that hadn’t been validated; I remember that as one of the arguments that people were presenting.

Capable of delivering more than 1000hp in qualifying, the beloved 2.65-liter turbo V8 engine formula was mesmerizing for fans and drivers alike. To make such power, small fortunes were spent; it was common to replace the motors in each car, after only 100-200 miles of use, at least once per day. Modern NTT IndyCar Series engines, making far less power, can go 10 times as long between rebuilds. But on the engine front at TMS in 2001, it was high power, high stress, and short life spans.

CART’s circus lived on the edge through the willingness of Ford/Cosworths, Hondas, and Toyotas to burn through bank vaults full of cash for our entertainment. There were also limits to the adventuresome fun.

Without pre-event engine durability testing to try some of the items being floated like running at lower revs, or with less boost to cut power and slow the cars, manufacturers were unwilling to take impromptu tuning risks in the middle of an event.

To German’s point, there were valid reasons to worry about introducing new vibrations and resonances to the motors. But were those concerns great enough to be completely inflexible? And to Hull’s point, the unwillingness to compromise in the slightest manner spoke to the myopic view taken by some in the room.

As engine manufacturers worried about their motors and, moreover, giving up an advantage that might emerge if one brand’s engine performed better in a detuned state, the health of the series and happiness of its new Texan fans were forgotten.

Wally Dallenbach, retiring CART chief steward: There was a fix, but nobody could agree on it. We could have done it with a twist of a wrench. We could have pulled four or five miles an hour out unilaterally from all the cars, take away boost, put in more wing. And nobody wanted it. It got to be a [matter of] selfishness or greed. You couldn’t get one group together to support the other group. Everybody said, “Well, if you do that, I’m going to take my cars home.” Nobody could come to a common ground and say, “In order to save the event, let’s all do this.”

Dr. Steven Olvey: And so this went on went well into the night. We didn’t get out of that meeting until about 11 or 11:30.

Robin Miller: Dario [Franchitti] was out walking his dog, I was leaving the track, and I rolled the window down and said, “What are you hearing?” He goes, “It’s a cluster ****. Nobody can agree on anything.”

 

Divided and steeped in self-interest, the parties in charge of putting on Sunday’s Firestone Firehawk 600 left the track for their homes and hotel rooms having failed each other in spectacular ways.

Inside CART’s 2001 Texas debacle: Silent running

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | May 2, 2021 5:42 PM



Divided and steeped in self-interest, the parties in charge of putting on Sunday’s Firestone Firehawk 600 left the track for their homes and hotel rooms having failed each other in spectacular ways.

For those who might have prayed for clarity and a fostering brotherhood when meetings resumed in the morning, disappointment was waiting patiently back at TMS.

Wally Dallenbach: We had meetings and meetings and meetings right through the morning of the race. I said, “I’m not going to be responsible for going out there and running at 230mph or whatever and have somebody get killed.”

The schedule called for a final warm-up session from 10-10:30 a.m. TMS also opened its gates at 10 a.m. and started the process of welcoming the first wave of fans into the facility. Kept in the dark, the first alarm bells rang for the crowd when the warm-up was cancelled.
Fans arriving expecting to see the CART warm-up had to settle for pace cars instead… Lesley Ann Miller/Motorsport Images

Having given themselves more time to lobby and debate, CART, TMS, and the engine manufacturers had a hard deadline to meet. With a 2 p.m. race start approaching, 60,000 tickets sold for the audience at TMS, and ESPN ready to air the race live to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the time bomb they’d created was either going to be defused or go off by early afternoon.

Chris Kneifel: I remember a conversation with Joe Heitzler, who was our CART leader at the time, and like me, Joe inherited Texas Speedway, taking on someone else’s dirty laundry. I remember he asked me, still trying to figure out a way to save the event, “What would happened if we just raced?” And I told him, “Joe, what will happen is if something goes wrong and it’s a multiple-car situation, it would be the equivalent of having a plane crash.”

I said, “We would have a plane crash and it wouldn’t just be drivers on the track. It would likely involve spectators or track workers, TV camera people, if the worst-case scenario happened if we raced. And I’m not on board with it. ‘Put the cars in the trucks and let’s leave’ is what I’ve been saying for a long time. We shouldn’t be here. And the best way to fix it is to leave, and deal with the rest later.”

Mike Zizzo: Joe asked me what I thought in that last meeting. I said, “I’ll be honest with everyone in this room. With everything we know about G forces and the speeds from Dr. Olvey and others, if we lose a driver, CART will be no more. We have to take that into consideration.”

Dr. Steven Olvey: The only choice was to call the race off.

Robin Miller: I called ESPN and said, “They may not run this race, so we better be ready to go live with something,” and Marlo Klain and I were live on “SportsCenter” Sunday morning.

Mike Zizzo: Everyone was making an effort to put on this race from the CART perspective. Everyone was trying to find a solution while keeping it safe for the drivers. I think that gets lost in the story sometimes. We didn’t just throw in the towel, and that’s why we waited so long to make a decision.

Presented with multiple ways to slow the cars to speeds below the G-LOC threshold, and put on a show for a new Texan fan base, CART, its team owners, engine suppliers, and TMS fired the last bullet into their collective feet. Some of the sport’s greatest negotiators and promoters were in that room. And yet, all the late-night hours spent on Saturday and again on Sunday morning were ultimately wasted: The engines would remain silent when 2 p.m. arrived.

Chris Kneifel: And looking back at it, it’s the best decision that I was ever part of.

Wally Dallenbach: We pulled the plug on it and it was an ugly move. We saved some lives that day, and that’s all that matters to me.

Kenny Brack: We were caught between a rock and a hard place, because there were fans in the stands, and we had to go home. It wasn’t pleasant.

Dr. Steven Olvey: And it cost CART millions.

Mike Zizzo: Social media didn’t exist back then. There wasn’t an instantaneous way to get the word out and make sure we didn’t inconvenience fans by any means. And sure, we knew they’d be disappointed much like all of us, but at least they wouldn’t be arriving to the race with anticipation of this great event happening. But the tools didn’t exist like they do today to hit social media and get the word out in an instant.

Chris Kneifel: The only thing that I wish is that the decision would’ve been made public 24, maybe 36 hours sooner, but I don’t have any regrets at all in terms of us not racing there because it wasn’t right. There was nothing good happening there.

Mike Zizzo: To this day, that’s probably the one thing I just wish we could have done different. Get the information out on Saturday. I think it would have been a lot less heartburn for everyone involved because from a Texas Motor Speedway perspective, you have 60,000 fans coming to your venue and then you feel a bit embarrassed as CART pulls the plug on the event while they’re sitting there. There was a lot of hard feelings the way it all unfolded.